Marco admired monks and wrote
that the Buddha, had he been Chris
tian, would have been a saint. But he
ignored Shazhou's grottoes. Maybe he
didn't see them. Or maybe, beholding
such a panoply of strange religious
art, he was simply overwhelmed.
He was more comfortable writing
about material things, such as fire
proof cloth. "I saw them myself," he
said of the fibers, which were asbes
tos. Europeans believed such fibers
came from an animal-a salamander,
yet-that lived in fire. Marco learned
they were mineral, mined in China.
Another subject that got Marco's
attention: sex. In a province near his
route, he said, if a stranger comes to
a man's house to lodge, the man "tells
his wife to do all that the stranger
wishes.... And the stranger stays
with his wife in the house and does
as he likes and lies with her in a bed."
The women, he added, are "fair and
gay and wanton."
Marco did not reveal how he knew
this. But historians say the report
rings true. "Minority peoples had
this custom," Professor Li said.
"They thought outsiders were distin
guished and would bring their family
new blood and a better future."
Sometimes, as Professor Li and I followed the old Silk Road through
Gansu Province, we were in sight of a wall-miles of it. Critics who doubt
that Marco reached China, who believe he merely collected other travelers'
tales, cite as evidence his failure to mention the Great Wall.
Chinese scholars, who generally hold Marco in high regard-he was, after
all, the greatest PR man China ever had-call this argument absurd. As they
point out, the Great Wall that all the world knows about, with sides and para
pets of brick and stone, didn't exist in Marco's time; it was built after the
Mongol dynasty was overthrown.
"What you're seeing is a wall built by the Han dynasty about 1,400 years
before Marco came," Professor Li said of the packed earth construction that
our highway followed. "It protected the Han territory from nomadic raiders"'
Originally it was about 30 feet high; parts still rise to 10 feet today.
By Marco's time it had long been abandoned; hence he had no reason to
mention it. Perhaps he omitted walls because they were commonplace. Many
cities of Europe were walled, as were many he had seen in Central Asia.
One morning as we cruised along in our SUV, Professor Li began to sing
a song that I remembered from Sunday school:
Jesus loves me, this I know,
For the Bible tells me so....
"I went to a missionary school for 12 years,' he said. "And I was baptized."
H ands-on wran
gling speeds a round
up on the plains of
InnerMongolia.
The highplace of
horses in Mongol life
reachedto the court
of rulerKublaiKhan.
Marco, a favored
courier,reported
thatKublai once
received as a gift
"more than 100,000
white horses very
beautiful andfine."
NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC, JUNE 2001